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Will Ontario Tories go with Brown’s big tent or Scheer and the social conservatives? Cohn

What does it mean to be a Conservative in Ontario? The province’s Tories are being led in two very different directions.

Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown during question period at Queen's Park on February 21, 2017. With the recent election of Andrew Scheer as head of the federal Conservatives, Ontario's Tories are being led in two very different directions. (Andrew Francis Wallace / Toronto Star)

A Tory is a Tory. Unless you live in Ontario, Canada — in which case it’s harder to tell which Tories stand for what.

Federally, your new Conservative leader is Andrew Scheer, a backbencher who bided his time under Stephen Harper’s prime ministership. And played footsie with pro-life, anti-gay-marriage, anti-sex-ed supporters.

Provincially, your Progressive Conservative leader is Patrick Brown. His political roots include all of the above (though he went further than Scheer by voting in 2012 to reopen the abortion debate in Ottawa).

Their shared outlooks were forged in the crucible of their real life experiences — as professional politicians almost all their adult lives. Scheer became an MP at age 25; Brown first won public office at 22.

Despite their similar vocations, their visions are diverging. Scheer clings to Conservative continuity federally, while Brown is repositioning the party provincially.

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Which may leave Ontario’s true-blue Tories torn: The federal wing flirts with homophobia and Islamophobia, while PCs make themselves more Muslim-friendly and gay-friendly provincially.

How can longtime activists keep their party loyalties straight? Will they stick with Scheer’s steady brand, or rally to Brown’s rebranding?

Difficult as it is for the party faithful to divine the dividing line between theology and ideology, it’s about more than just religion.

Never mind that the new federal leader opposed a perfunctory parliamentary motion condemning Islamophobia (citing specious free speech grounds). He also rejects any form of carbon pricing to combat global warming, so that provinces can do their own thing — or nothing. By contrast, Brown has seen the light on a carbon tax against greenhouse gas emissions.

While Scheer is promising faith-based funding (or tax refunding) for private (read religious) schools, Ontario’s PCs have already been burned at that stake — and are loath to repeat their mistake by taking any more leaps of faith.

Brown cast his lot with socially conservative issues while in Ottawa — like Scheer, he voted against legalizing gay marriage. But since coming to Queen’s Park he has recanted, recasting himself as a marcher in Pride parades. And while Scheer is still grudging on transgender questions, Brown has made the transition to supporting human rights for all.

Scheer didn’t wear his religion on his sleeve while wooing supporters for the federal leadership, but signalled he was of the faith. His website — quickly unplugged after he won the race but still archived on Google — used coded language to win over opponents of sex education (a provincial issue in any event) by promising to “protect the rights of parents as first educators to their children.”

Brown played the same double game during the 2014-15 provincial leadership race, and again during a Scarborough byelection, telling sex-ed opponents what they wanted to hear. When he no longer needed them, the PC leader suddenly divorced his faith-based supporters. Later denouncing the federal party’s burka-bashing impulses, he reached out to all religious groups.

“It doesn’t matter who you love, where you’re born, what the colour of your skin is, what your faith is, whether you belong to a union or not, you have a home in our PC Party,” Brown says at every opportunity, post-epiphany.

You can hear the same phrasing in newspaper interviews, fundraising speeches and party advertisements. His belated embrace of pluralism and tolerance, diversity and humanity, hearkens back to the pre-Harper era of Brian Mulroney’s Tories and the Bill Davis PCs.

By announcing a carbon tax, renouncing homophobia and rejecting Islamophobia, Brown has taken a U-turn — while Scheer sticks to the straight and narrow. Deviating from party orthodoxy is a calculated risk.

“We’re excited that a man of his conviction (Scheer) is leading the party, and we don’t expect him to pull a Patrick Brown on us,” fumed Charles McVety, the crusading head of Canada Christian College. “He (Brown) betrayed us of course, and went against us and announced that we’re not even welcome in the party when we’re the ones who put him in the party.”

Brown’s changing positions suggest a brave — if not quite bold — new face for his party. He is taking a stand on tolerance and the environment, while taking a pass on most other policy stances.

Perhaps Brown knew a lot less about himself — and life — as a 20-something, early-onset politician trying to fit into Harper’s Ottawa. Today, we know even less about where he will take the provincial party in future.

As for Scheer, that other lifetime politician, what life lessons has he learned along the way? A Tory is a Tory, but too soon to say.

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